Review
It's a very fun game, I'm glad this was in my feed when I checked Itch.io last Sunday. I played 3 runs total, and managed myself into endless twice.
The music and graphics are all great too. The character you play as is cute-as-heck and the other NPCs are pleasing to look at too. The battle music is very fitting and pumps me full of adrenaline when I'm thinking of my next move while the other music that plays all throughout the dungeon is calming with a feel of mystery to it. That game being a roguelike + the gameplay element of rearranging your backpack is fully unique and very creative. I'm being serious when I say this does look like an early access indie game on Steam with a price tag of about 10$/€ and yet, this is free!
With all the good being said, I do have a few suggestions for the developer, particularly to balance the items in-game.
First things first, ailments/status conditions need to have a timer or a way to refresh/reset them, otherwise this becomes way too broken. Both the player and the enemies can make good use of status conditions to buff or debuff each other. For example, a haste value of 15 or above and you become quasi-immortal against all physical attacks.
Haste is a buff that increases defense atop existing items that already increase it, so if you have a lil' buckler (Love that thing) and use it, normally it'd give you 6 shields, but with a haste of 15, you gain 21 shields instead.
Regen is a buff that automatically recovers health every turn, regen makes it difficult for enemies or the player to kill either one or the other. This comment below really summarizes my concern with that: https://itch.io/post/5435057
Poison hurts every turn. The most interesting aspect of it is the fact that it basically ignores defense and I think it's fine this way, but that also means that the player is enticed to use items that inflict poison rather than items for damage alone since late-game enemies really love shielding themselves up. I tried a poison build and it worked even better than my magic build which is also in need of a nerf imo, gonna get to that later.
I have played a few roguelikes before and many RPGs and status conditions/buffs/debuffs/ailments are a staple, but this is the first time ever I come across a game like this that has uncurable permanent (Per battle) status conditions and from what I have gathered, this does not work all that well since again this is broken and can be abused by the player and the enemies, particularly the player.
Another thing that I really did not like about the game were the curses, or their implementation so to speak; in the screenshots and video above, curses did exist in previous versions of the game, but they were atop the inventory and directly added by the enemies. In this version, you, the player, have to manually add the curses to your inventory whenever an enemy uses a curse on you which kind of kills the momentum of the game, but also they take physical space in your backpack, so you end throwing out useful items in exchange of annoying pseudo-items.
Magic items are OP. Most wands cost no energy (or like I'd like to call them action turns or press turns), so as long as you have mana on you, you can abuse them to hell and beyond and then there are items that further increase your mana count: The wizard cap passively increases your mana by 5 every turn at the cost of 1 action turn; the Necromonicon gives 1 poison to all enemies and gives the player 2 mana at the cost of 1 measly action turn. By using the Necronomicon 3 times (Assuming you have no wizard cap), you can give 3 poison to all enemies and then you can hit them 6 more times with your wand. You really need to play the game to understand how broken a magic build is. In fact, the final boss couldn't even make his move because I had a lot of mana and just burned it all against him.
Lastly, I am fairly bummed I cannot play version 1 of the game to compare with the latest build.
That's it really, I hope at least that my remarks are considered.
